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work. Variety of outlook is bound up with our very 
existence. In the very ground-work of our national life 
there is antithesis, the necessary contrast of different points 
of view. 
The English temperament is separate from the Scotch, 
the Irish and the Welsh, but in no way can the English arrogate 
all the moral and intellectual forces which have been spent 
through so many ages in the building up of what is a lasting 
honour to the British nation. In the course of history and 
more especially in the last 200 years there have been absorbed 
in the more specifically English temperament, many factors 
which in their origin were Irish, Scotch, Welsh or Continental, 
and to this resultant the name English may without offence 
be applied. This unity rests on an understanding to agree 
to differ on a vague but real compromise between individual 
liberty and social order — a compromise which has no precisely 
formulated conditions but has become an attitude of mind. 
There are two things to which, through many generations, 
English people have attached signal importance. They have 
a passion for personal liberty and they like to be allowed to 
to speak their own mind. There is one thing they strenuously 
object to — any unnecessary disturbance of the settled social 
order which comfortably suits their work. And so many 
are the incalculable elements which the future conceals that 
they do not believe in the possibility of making, by any 
deliberate operation of the intellect, any precise, long-sighted 
forecast in points of practical detail, of the course of events 
which are likely to affect the present conditions of their 
national life. Personal liberty is cherished as the most 
precious of all gifts ; determination to secure it stands out in 
the great Statutes which have marked the crises in our national 
history. It is no accident that England has been the birth- 
place of the philosophy of individualism. The same belief 
in the sovereign claims of personal liberty helped to make 
it possible to emancipate the slaves, and the right to speak 
one’s own mind is one of the safeguards of personal liberty. 
At all points in English history this passion for personal 
liberty and free speech have gone with settled preference for 
social order. We can afford to be violently individual because 
of the firm settlement of our established state of things. 
Individualism has never been pressed to the point which 
disintegrates society. The English people fear and hate 
anarchy. Once let the claims of personal liberty and free 
speech seriously threaten the comfortable working system of 
social order and the English people would throw their weight 
into the scale of authority and control. Advanced theories 
